Principal Game Animator

Job Details

• Position: Principal Gameplay Animator
• Location: Bengaluru
• Company: LILA Games
• Job Type: Full-Time

About the Role:

We are looking for an experienced and technically strong keyframe Principal/Lead Animator to join our team for an exciting third-person mobile shooter game.

As the animation lead, you will own and drive the animation vision, style, and execution across the game.

You will be hands-on in creating high-quality animations while also troubleshooting complex animation challenges, and working closely with engineers, game designers, and artists to ensure our characters move with style, clarity, and impact

Key Responsibilities:

1. Animation Pipeline Ownership: Work across the full animation production line—from rigging and skinning to implementation and integration in Unity—delivering polished, optimized content.
2. Hand-Keyed Animations: Create high-quality, stylized hand-keyed animations for a third-person mobile shooter, including locomotion (walk, run, sprint), combat, and interaction sequences.
3. Animation Transitions: Create smooth blending and transition animations between different actions to ensure fluid, natural movement between different actions.
4. Consistency in Animation Style: Define and maintain a consistent animation style across all characters and assets, aligning with the overall visual direction of the game.
5. Unity Integrations: Implement, optimize and integrate animations using Unitys animation controller and player settings. Work directly with engineers and designers to build and maintain animation state machines
6. Rigging: Build, maintain, and improve rigs and skin meshes. Update rigs to support new animations and improve animation quality.
7. Skinning Costumes: Work on skinning and integrating various costumes and character models, ensuring they animate correctly.
8. Bug Identification & Fixes: Proactively identify and fix animation-related issues, maintaining visual quality and gameplay feel throughout development. Knowledgeable in Unity animation debugging tools

Hard Skills:

• Proficiency in Maya and MotionBuilder: Advanced skills in both Maya and MotionBuilder for creating and refining stylized animations. Uses modern animation workflow and tools to work quickly and efficiently.
• Strong Understanding of Maya Layers: Good understanding of using layers in Maya for animation, allowing for efficient organization and management of complex scenes.
• Unity Expertise: Strong understanding of Unity, particularly in using animation controllers and configuring player settings and state machines. Strong understanding of how animations are integrated in a game engine.
• Rigging & Skinning: Proficient in character rigging and skinning, ensuring smooth and natural animations within the stylized framework.
• Animation Principles: In-depth knowledge of animation principles, including posing, timing, spacing, and weight.
• Technical Troubleshooting: Ability to debug and resolve animation-related issues within game engines.
• Adaptability with Emerging Tools: Willingness to learn and implement animation using new tools, software, and AI technologies like Cascadeur, Move AI, and Deepmotion to enhance workflow and animation quality.

Before applying, please review our LILA Games | Business Values (https://bit.ly/3rsN1ti) document. We take our culture incredibly seriously and will not accommodate a Values mismatch in our company. So please make sure your Values are in alignment before you apply!

Lila Games is a learning organization, and one of the fundamental principles of our company is to unlock human potential with learning through challenging work so people become masters of their craft. You can expect to supercharge your learning once you get into this role, but hard work and effort are expected.